This Is How Traveling Changes You After Returning Home

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There is something exiting in buying a one way ticket to somewhere in the world, and not knowing when you’ll come back. Some kind of freedom of choice, in choosing for yourself when you’ve had enough of traveling, or when you’ve decided to drop your luggage somewhere.

Some may decide to build homes somewhere new, and others, have homes that await them. Like a break in a relationship you simply needed some time apart, to be better for the future.

At last, when that clock strikes the time for you to come back, you’ll realize as you land back in your old town that nothing is as it was…And there is a certain frustration that grows within you which you find hard to explain to those who haven’t lived what you lived…

It’s not only that we change but it’s that the things around us haven’t grown with us. The feeling we have is much like when Alice in Wonderland drank the magic potion and her body grew too big for her own house, too big for her own good and it almost made her regret she hadn’t drank the potion in the first place:

“It’s much pleasanter at home, when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole…” Alice in Wonderland

As you’ve lived days if not months of travel and complete freedom to be and do what you please, free of material things, free to do eat at whatever time, free to go wherever you want to go, returning to a world that dictates how you should be is hard. Especially if your friends seem to be oblivious to it.

As you come back, you’ll be looking for the same freedom and authenticity you lived across the globe – because you gave yourself the freedom of it. But on your return, you will have grown too big for your old house, you’ll feel lost, unable to understand the differences between you and the others and you’ll want little by little to start distancing yourself from those that don’t understand what you have lived and grown into.

When coming back, you’ll notice you will have changed because others haven’t. And some might even call you up on it and say “You’ve changed…” And you will be left with a bitter taste of having to accept it if you don’t want to end up alone…How ironic is seems, that you probably fought with loneliness during your travels, accepted it and finally conquered it, only to come back to the world you left behind, and have to battle with loneliness again…

But the truth is, it is up to the person coming home to make a choice – that of choosing his new home wisely and accepting where he came from.

Yes, moving is exhausting. You’ll have to clean up, arrange, sort and possibly throw away certain things. But this is when we need to remind ourselves perhaps that it is rarely the move in itself which is stressful – but that it is the stress of being stressed that drains us.
So maybe you are reading this while waiting for your plane to bring you back home – or maybe you are travelling or have moved abroad and are pondering to head back home…Then this is what I can tell you to expect: If you’ve gone to travel to have fun, you will most likely have no new choices to make. But if you have gone to travel to grow or have noticed that you have…then you are bound to have to make that choice – that of making a new home, and welcoming people in it regardless of how different they are from you – as you yourself will have changed too.

The old you has been left behind to leave place for the new you. And it will be a new you that your new friends will embrace, that your old friends will struggle to understand, and that your true friends will learn to embrace.